NUCLEUS Deliverable 4.6 Nottingham Field Trip Report
NUCLEUS FIELD TRIP REPORT | CELL 5 | PUBLIC POLICY Reference:
664932-NUCLEUS-H2020-ISSI2014-2015/H2020-ISSI-2014-1
Editing:
University of Aberdeen
Code:
D 4.6
Approved by:
Field trip participants
Version & Date:
<1, 30/06/2016>
Process Owner:
University of Edinburgh
Summary Nine consortium members of the NUCLEUS project visited Nottingham, UK, in May 2016 to undertake the fourth project field trip. The purpose of the trip was to explore the role of public policy in responsible practice of research and innovation (‘RRI’; Von Schomberg, 2011). The main aim of the field trip was to understand barriers and best practice for embedding the practice of responsible research and innovation into the relationships between local administration, local and regional policymaking, and higher education institutions. What we learned during the trip will feed into the RRI Implementation Roadmap for those institutions who will be trying to embed responsible practice of research and innovation in ten installed and twenty-five mobile ‘test beds’ (‘Nuclei’) during the second half of the NUCLEUS project. The field trip was led by the Beltane Public Engagement Network (Edinburgh) and our hosts in Nottingham, Jon Rea of Nottingham City Council and Karen Moss of Nottingham Trent University. A series of interviews with public policy professionals, practitioners and university staff took place over two days. The main recommendation from the Field Trip, which arose in many interviews in different forms, was the need for dedicated relationship managers to mediate the relationships between universities, the local administration, practitioners, industry and national policymakers. The repeated suggestion was that these posts could help overcome many of the barriers to RRI, such as not meeting partner expectations, not engaging stakeholders early enough or not engaging with the right stakeholders. A barrier which, once again, presented itself on this trip and to which there was once again no clear solution presented was academic career progression – how do you reward researchers for policy engagement without compromising what makes academic research so valuable? Last but not least, something which bubbled through all of our interviews was the exciting potential of Nottingham as a place to test research in action as a ‘Living Lab’.
Version & Date 1, 30/06/2016
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